The Organizations, Occupations, and Work blog (associated with the American Sociological Association) organized an interesting panel discussion between Chris Prener, Christopher Land, Steffen Böehm and myself. I’ll summarize/critique the positions here and provide links for further reading.
Chris Prener initiated the conversation by asking “Is Facebook “Using” Its Members?” Prener claims that, though the company gives users “access to networks of friends and other individuals as well as social organizations and associations,” Facebook—with it’s advertising revenue “somewhere in the neighborhood of $3.2 billion”—” benefits far more in this somewhat symbiotic relationship.” He concludes that Facebook, and social media more broadly, represent “a [new] space where even unpaid, voluntary leisure activities can be exploited for the commercial gain of the entities within which those activities occur.”
My critique of Prener’s piece is that he assert that Facebook benefits more from the online social networking than its 845 million users; this is an empirical question—one that requires further evidence an calculation. If we assume Prener’s $3.2 billion figure is correct, Facebook is making only $3.79 in ad revenue per user. I would guess that many, if not most, users believe Facebook provides them with benefits that exceed that sum. In any case, exploitation still exists regardless of who benefits most.
Christopher Land and Steffen Böehm echo Prener in their piece: “They are exploiting us! Why we all work for Facebook for free.” They too see Facebook’s profit model as dependent on exploitation. But they approach the issue from a slightly different theoretical bent. Drawing on Herman and Chomsky’s famous work on mass media, Land and Böehm argue that users (not content) are the primary product that social media creates, since it is users that are being sold to advertisers. They also observe, sardonically, that Facebook users experience a double-freedom insofar as users efforts are non-coerced but also unpaid. But just as Marx noted that capitalism achieved a monopoly over the means of survival (that is to say, people have to sell their labor to survive because that are otherwise denied access to the mean of production), Land and Böehm argue that Facebook (and capitalism, more broadly) have achieved a monopoly over the means of online social networking.
Land and Böehm might have improved their analogy by spelling out that social interaction fulfills a natural human need and that participation on Facebook is coercive because so many invitations, conversations, memes, etc. are accessible only through the platform, thus non-participation leads to non-inclusion and social isolation. A more important issue I see with their argument, however, is the apples-to-apples comparison between broadcast media consumers and social media prosumers. Herman and Chomsky were focused on the broadcast media’s production of passive subjects; social media, on the other hand, is significant in that it produces active subjects (or, rather, subjects produce themselves for social media [see: Gilles Deleuze, “Post-script on the Society of Control” and Nathan Jurgeson, “Experiencing Life Through the Logic of Facebook“]). Herman and Chomsky were less concerned with exploitation than with political acquiescence. If Herman and Chomsky are correct in assuming that passivity in the realm of broadcast media consumption passes over into the realm of politics, then activity in the realm of social media prosumption might equally be expected to translate into politics (though Chomsky himself remains skeptical). In any case, while broadcast media consumers are subject to manipulation, it is unclear that they are subject to exploitation.
In my piece, “Facebook is Not a Factory (But Still Exploits its Users),” I argue that Facebook use benefits both users and owners, but, while Facebook gains monetarily, users receive immaterial benefits. This qualitative/quantitative difference in the forms of capital derived from Facebook makes it difficult to compare the relative degree of exploitation between Facebook use and traditional labor. However, we can infer that Facebook is probably not more exploitative than conventional labor and is certainly less alienating.
The critique I have of my own piece (pointed out by Alexis Madrigal via Nathan Jurgenson) is that I use Facebook’s total market valuation in estimating the rate of exploitation for each user. This valuation is, of course, highly speculative and also includes so-called “constant capital.” It is more appropriate to do as Prener has done and use ad revenue as the basis for calculating the rate of exploitation.
Clearly, the consensus among this group of authors is the exploitation is an integral part of Facebook’s operation; however, questions remain as to its scope and significance.
Follow PJ Rey on Twiter: @pjrey
Comments 6
Facebook, Labor, and the Possible Perils of Social Media « Organizations, Occupations and Work — February 23, 2012
[...] 2/23/12 @ 2:30EST – Additional Follow-up Post @ Cyberology [...]
tomslee — February 23, 2012
If Facebook is making only $3.79 per person per year from us, how many people would be prepared to pay $5 per year to avoid ads and have Facebook not keep their stuff? (My son's idea) Lots, I think. So all I can think is that they plan on making a lot more in the future off each of us.
PJ Patella-Rey — February 24, 2012
That is one potential (and rather interesting) sort of "freemium" model. However, I think Facebook is very reluctant to have us think about there profit model at all because forefronting these business issue may disrupt people's sense of community and willingness to participate.
Ben Brucato — February 26, 2012
This is an interesting piece that draws attention to immaterial labor and thus moves the discussion in positive directions.
Here, however, value is too tightly defined. We're clearly beyond quantitative valuation schemes that can be measured with dollars, exclusively. Also important to recognize is monopolization of a given market, the accuracy in speculating future position, etc. that can be measured (partially) with market share, especially longitudinally. But these are still overly reductive approaches.
The problem still is with taking immaterial labor and production and assigning some very finite, material measure -- especially in dollars. Control and power are what is at issue in productive labor, not dollars and cents.
As I have mentioned in some of my work with regard to surveillance, in a mode of production that has become at least partly dematerialized, value is as well. When data is valued, not only for its propensity to produce income, but for its ability to control markets and production (and the bodies of producers), the production of surveillance data (e.g. the movement through a surveyed vector) is exploited by the entity that garners and controls that data. Whether that data produces a profit (and how much) or loss is irrelevant in some ways. What is additionally important is the specific relationships of power.
The entity with the surveillance camera (or with the social media program) may produce benefits for the producers (a feeling of safety or security with a surveillance camera, connections across time and space with social media), but the relationship is fixed within specific material and virtual relations that maintain at least some resilience in a division of power.
While I see the value in asking empirical questions with simple measures, the limitations in doing so need to be clearly acknowledged.
Additionally, it's important to recognize the ecologies involved and to think beyond individual corporate entities or particular platforms. The fundamental qualitative shifts in communications and interpersonal networks ought to be central. Just as an individual factory cannot be considered in its productive relationships as separate from a system of factory production, Facebook needs to be placed within an ecology of virtual networks. The technological systems, the juridico-political foundations, the discursive formations, and their particular genealogies that enable something like social media to not only exist but to have meaning for their millions of users cannot be considered as mere context, and certainly not as noise. Neither should they be naturalized, seen as a given. Further, those with financial and other interests in Facebook, or for the overall health of the social media ecology need to be considered. This is difficult - perhaps impossible - to allocate some quantitative measure to, and this is one reason why sociologists (I myself am one) have a hard time addressing these items.
Thanks again for generating an important discussion.
The High Cost of Abstention » Cyborgology — March 6, 2012
[...] life, social media is increasingly difficult to opt out of. P.J. Rey points this out in his recent discussion of Facebook exploitation. Here, I want to explore why and how this is the [...]